Immigrant Employment Success in Canada, Part I: Individual and Contextual Causes

An interdisciplinary synthesis of Canadian research on immigrant employment success points toward key research priorities. Four determinants of immigrant employment success are widely recognized as significant: immigration policy and settlement patterns, “entry” and assimilation over time, lower value of immigrant human capital, and origins of immigrants and the possibility of discrimination. Other determinants include labour market niches, social and cultural capital, and institutional contexts. Addressing key research priorities—and distinguishing individual and contextual causes—will require new analytic strategies and sources of data. A companion paper, Part II: Understanding the Decline, applies the framework presented here to research on declining employment success for immigrants.     

Work and immigrants: An analysis of employment activity in the first ten years of establishment in the Montreal area

The Quebec labour market of the last two decades has undergone profound changes due to progress in information technology and market globalization. This new context has generated new forms of work which have been termed” non-standard work”. Since the early eighties, the number of such positions has been growing significantly. Often associated with precarious employment activity, the phenomenon of non-standard work has raised a fundamental question: are these positions stable? This is the main question that we wish to investigate from the perspective of new immigrants: do new immigrants achieve stability in the labour market upon arrival in Quebec? In a society that has, quite often for demographic and economic reasons, welcomed an average of 35,000 newcomers every year since the early 90s, the success (or failure) of economic integration rests in part on immigrants’ capacity to participate in the labour market and remain employed. Our analysis is based on a longitudinal survey that describes the biographical trajectories of the Settlement of New Immigrants (SNI). This survey describes the main attempts of 1,000 immigrants’ to establish themselves over a period of 10 years in the greater Montreal area. This research mainly shows that continuous sequences of employment are growing overtime, thus ensuring new immigrants greater stability in the labour market. On the other hand, results suggest that racial discrimination modulates labour market participation, in particular for natives of North Africa and the Middle East.     

Admission and Employment Criteria Discrepancies: Experiences of Skilled Immigrants in Toronto

This research contributes to our understandings of the employment experiences of skilled immigrants in Canada by complementing and expanding upon statistical findings from previously published studies. Through in-depth interviews with 35 skilled immigrants from Bangalore, India living in Toronto, Canada, findings indicate that migrants experience employment frustrations stemming directly from the discrepancy between admission criteria (foreign education and work experience) and employment criteria (Canadian education and work experience). After summarizing the statistical data on the non-recognition of foreign credentials, we conclude that among our sample of immigrants, frustrations stem not from credential discounting in and of itself, but from Canada’s point system for entry, which misleads these migrants about its existence and prevalence.     

Immigration and Occupational Mobility of Native Workers in Spain. A Gender Perspective

This paper studies the economic effect of immigration on native working conditions, focusing on the impact of the inflow of immigrant labour on occupational mobility among native workers. Basing on a gender-segmented labour market, we propose an extension of the model presented by Peri and Sparber American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 1(3), 135-169, (2009). The model controls for gender and time in order to check for potential differences in immigration effects associated with gender or immigrant length of residence. This research reveals the existence of such differences, by showing that female immigrant inflow has a greater positive short-term impact on occupational mobility among female unskilled native workers. In addition, the long-term study discloses a slight occupational assimilation of male immigrants towards employment patterns of male native workers and a permanent confinement of female immigrants in a few “niche jobs”.     

Cultural representations of immigrant workers by service providers and employers

Cultural perceptions by immigrant service providers and employers potentially shape the employment trajectories of immigrants. I examine perceptions of what motivates immigrants to participate in the Canadian labour market through a Vancouver-based interview survey with immigrant service providers, employment counsellors, NGO administrators and employers who service and/or employ newcomers from South Asia and the former Yugoslavia. The results reveal that multiple perceptions coexist. These perceptions project that immigrants work as a means of survival, a moral obligation, a quest for social distruction and an instrument of social integration. Our understanding of ethnic segmentation of immigrant labour should consider these perceptions.     

Being Employed by a Co-national: A Cul-de-sac or a Short Cut to the Main Road of the Labour Market?

This paper analyses the impact of working in an ethnic economy on subsequent labour market performance for newly arrived immigrants. Is it a short cut to the labour market or does it lock immigrants into low income jobs? Working in an ethnic economy is defined as being employed by a self-employed co-national. The comparison group is a matched sample of newly arrived immigrants who were without employment during the same period. Swedish panel data for the period 1998?C2005 are used, and the sample is restricted to male immigrants, 20?C55?years of age. Using propensity score matching, we find that immigrants who were employed by self-employed co-nationals are more likely to be employed in the near future, but that the types of employment they have are associated with lower incomes. Many continue to be employed by self-employed co-nationals or become self-employed themselves.     

Social Capital, Employment and Occupational Status of the New Immigrants in Canada

Using the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants in Canada (LSIC), this study examines the role of social capital in the labour market integration of new immigrants in Canada, utilizing various measures of social capital and treating employment and occupational Socio-Economic Scale (SES) as the indicators of labour market integration. The findings show that visible minority immigrants have significantly lower levels of employment and SES compared to white immigrants. Furthermore, social capital contributes significantly to an increased likelihood of employment and also to higher SES positions. However, the effect of social capital varies by the types of social capital, ethno-racial origins, as well as forms of economic integration.     

Native Language and Immigrant Labour Market Outcomes: An Alternative Approach to Measuring the Returns for Language Skills

In contrast with the conventional approach of studying the interrelation between immigrants’ language skills and their chances of succeeding in the host country labour market, this article explores the relevance of having and not having a mother tongue in common with the native population for otherwise similar immigrants. This is accomplished by using linked register data from two countries, which makes it possible to separate people according to their native language. We find that immigrants who have their mother tongue in common with natives have substantially higher employment and income levels than immigrants who originate from the same country, but whose native language is linguistically different from the dominant language of the host country. The results support the view that language is a fundamental part of immigrants’ human capital and thus promotes their labour market outcomes.     

Employment, ethnicity and metropolitan context: The case of young Canadian immigrants

Although employment of young immigrants is a concern for policy-makers and an expectation of Canadian society, we know relatively little about the labour market performance of young immigrants. A series of logistic regression analyses of a sample of 492,048 youths from the 1996 Public Use Microdata File (PUMF) examines the influence of ethnicity and metropolitan context on the employment probabilities of immigrant and Canadian-born youths between the ages of 15 and 18. The article interprets the results in the light of the existing literature and discusses policy implications.     

International comparison of group differences in general mental ability for immigrants versus non‐immigrants

Globalization has led to increased migration and labor mobility over the past several decades and immigrants generally seek jobs in their new countries. Tests of general mental ability (GMA) are common in personnel selection systems throughout the world. Unfortunately, GMA test scores often display differences between majority groups and ethnic subgroups that may represent a barrier to employment for immigrants. The purpose of this study was to examine differences in GMA based on immigrant status in 29 countries (or jurisdictions of countries) throughout the world using an existing database that employs high‐quality measurement and sampling methodologies with large sample sizes. The primary findings were that across countries, non‐immigrants (n = 139,464) scored approximately half of a standard deviation (d = .53) higher than first‐generation immigrants (n = 22,162) but only one‐tenth of a standard deviation (d = .12) higher than second‐generation immigrants (n = 6,428). Considerable variability in effect sizes was found across countries as Nordic European and Germanic European countries evidenced the highest non‐immigrant/first‐generation immigrant mean differences and Anglo countries the smallest. Countries with the lowest income inequality tended to evidence the highest differences in GMA between non‐immigrants and first‐generation immigrants. Implications for GMA testing as a potential barrier to immigrant employment success and the field's current understanding of group differences in GMA test scores will be discussed.     

Screening,Skills and Cultural Fit: Theorizing Immigrant Skill Utilization from an Organizational Perspective

This article examines the issue of skill utilization among highly skilled immigrants in Canada from an organizational perspective. It argues that bringing insights from organizational sociology more strongly into discussions of skill utilization—which tend to focus on returns to immigrant capital (human, social, cultural) or employer discrimination—would provide greater understanding of how, when and the extent to which each one of these factors matters for immigrant hiring within a particular employment sector. In order to illustrate this point, it draws on empirical material from 20 interviews with hiring managers at information and communication technology (ICT) companies in the Greater Toronto Area to show that there is organizational-level variation among firms in three key aspects of hiring that are relevant to discussions of immigrant skill utilization: definitions of ‘skills’, notions of ‘cultural fit’ and screening processes. The article concludes by pointing to avenues for further study and considering implications for settlement policy.     

Long Sickness Absence Differences Between Natives and Immigrant Workers: The Role of Differences in Self-reported Health

The limited empirical evidence on sickness absence among immigrants indicates that non-Western immigrants have a higher incidence of sickness-related absence than natives. The purpose of this article is to examine whether health is a contributing factor to the immigrant-native sickness absence gap. The present article makes use of two data sources: register data (FD-trygd) with labour market and long-term sickness absence information linked to a cross-section questionnaire survey on health: The Oslo Health Study, which was conducted in 2000–2001 (N?=?14,114). The findings in this article show that non-Western immigrants have a higher incidence of long-term sickness absence than natives. For both women and men, the differences in long-term sickness absence between non-Western immigrants and natives can be explained by poorer self-reported health among immigrants.     

The gist of the abnormal: Above-chance medical decision making in the blink of an eye

Very fast extraction of global structural and statistical regularities allows us to access the “gist”—the basic meaning—of real-world images in as little as 20 ms. Gist processing is central to efficient assessment and orienting in complex environments. This ability is probably based on our extensive experience with the regularities of the natural world. If that is so, would experts develop an ability to extract the gist from the artificial stimuli (e.g., medical images) with which they have extensive visual experience? Anecdotally, experts report some ability to categorize images as normal or abnormal before actually finding an abnormality. We tested the reality of this perception in two expert populations: radiologists and cytologists. Observers viewed brief (250- to 2,000-ms) presentations of medical images. The presence of abnormality was randomized across trials. The task was to rate the abnormality of an image on a 0–100 analog scale and then to attempt to localize that abnormality on a subsequent screen showing only the outline of the image. Both groups of experts had above-chance performance for detecting subtle abnormalities at all stimulus durations (cytologists d' ≈ 1.2 and radiologists d' ≈ 1), whereas the nonexpert control groups did not differ from chance (d' ≈ 0.23, d' ≈ 0.25). Furthermore, the experts’ ability to localize these abnormalities was at chance levels, suggesting that categorization was based on a global signal, and not on fortuitous attention to a localized target. It is possible that this global signal could be exploited to improve clinical performance.     

Un Emploi Correspondant À Ses Attentes Personnelles? Le Cas Des Nouveaux Immigrants Au Québec

This paper studies the characteristics of immigrants who are likely (or unlikely) to find a job matching their aspirations. Data are from the 2002 Survey of selected workers for a sample of 1,875 economic immigrants that were admitted in Quebec between January 1997 and June 2000. Our empirical results confirm standard findings in the literature on immigration about the limited international transferability of human capital across countries, especially, of the foreign experience. In order to improve the chances of success of new immigrants, the implications of such results for immigration policy command a questioning and a re-examination of: (1) the resources allocated to the recruitment and information of potential immigrants in their country of origin prior to migration; (2) the programs already in place to facilitate their integration in the labour market; and (3) the Point System that is in use for selecting the most potentially successful immigrants.     

Visual statistical learning at basic and subordinate category levels in real-world images

Visual statistical learning (VSL) has been proposed as a powerful mechanism underlying the striking ability of human observers to handle complex visual environments. Previous studies have shown that VSL can occur when statistical information is embedded at multiple levels of abstraction, such as at semantically different category levels. In the present study, we further examined whether statistical regularities at a basic category level (e.g., a regular sequence of a bird, then a car, and then a dog) could influence the ability to extract statistical regularities at the subordinate level (e.g., a regular sequence of a parrot, then a sports car, and then an Eskimo dog). In the familiarization phase, participants were exposed to a stream of real-world images whose semantic categories had temporal regularities. Importantly, the temporal regularities existed at both the basic and subordinate levels, or the regularities existed at only the subordinate level, depending on the experimental condition. After completing the familiarization, participants performed a surprise two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task for a familiarity judgment between two triplets in which the temporal regularities were either preserved or not preserved. Our results showed that the existence of statistical regularities at the basic level did not influence VSL at the subordinate level. The subsequent experiments showed these results consistently even when the basic-level categories had to be explicitly recognized and when the stimuli were not easily categorized at their subordinate level. Our results suggest that VSL is constrained to learn a particular level of patterns when patterns are presented across multiple levels.     

Responding to regional labour demand: International migration and labour markets in New Zealand’s regions

New Zealand, like Australia and Canada, has long had an active policy of seeking immigrants to “grow” its population and economy. Unlike the other two countries, New Zealand does not have a federal system of government, and the absence of a state or provincial level of legislative authority has meant that policies to promote immigration and to meet labour market needs have been centrally driven. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, labour market activation policies in New Zealand were focussed on supply, including the engagement or re-engagement of workers. In the early years of the twenty-first century, there have been significant labour shortages, particularly (but not only) of skilled labour in a range of industries and regions, as well as changes in the nature of labour market engagement associated with the rise of various forms of non-standard employment. The policy focus has been increasingly demand-focussed and driven by local labour market considerations. It has also increasingly revolved around recruiting immigrant labour in response to local skill shortages. This paper discusses the way in which regions in New Zealand have developed schemes that are designed to attract immigrant labour to meet local labour demand as well as provide a key driver in local economic development.     

Recruiting through advertising or employee referrals: Costs,yields, and the effects of geographic focus

Research on recruiting has generally considered the effects of recruiting source on employee tenure or performance, and has argued that formal employment ads are inferior to informal sources, notably employee referrals. We test two dimensions for evaluating the effects of recruiting sources on the recruiting process—cost per new hire and yield ratio. We also suggest a new dimension for distinguishing between different types of employment ads—geographical focus—which we define as the clarity and distinctiveness of the labour market that an ad is likely to reach. Geographically focused ads are shown to cost less and yield more appropriate applicants than unfocused ads. Considering the cost, yield, and focus of ads can promote the effectiveness of recruiting processes. The study therefore has both practical applications and implications for further research on recruiting sources.     

Getting a foothold: Male immigrant employment integration and structural change in Sweden, 1970–1995

In this article the employment performance of native and foreign-born men in Sweden is examined in the period 1970–1995. Using longitudinal data, the relative chance of obtaining first employment during the first two years in the labour market for natives and various immigrant groups is estimated. The main hypothesis tested is to what kind and what degree structural changes in the labour market affect the employment performance of various immigrant groups. The results show that since the middle of the 1980s, there has been a change in employment performance among immigrant men, who are perceived to be culturally and linguistically less close to Sweden. It is during this period that structural changes in the labour market occurred, in particular the organizational and technological changes that demand more communicativeand interpersonal skills, that is, Sweden-specific skills.     

Location, Location, Location: Where Do Immigrants Reside in Australia?

Concentration of immigrants in a particular area has important implications for the provision of social services and the local labor market. This paper examines the location choice of immigrants in five major statistical regions in Australia using the 2001 Census of Population and Housing. The paper focuses on differences in location choice across birthplace groups and cohort arrivals. The results show that immigrants from the UK are less likely to reside in larger cities (e.g., Sydney, Melbourne) compared to immigrants from other birthplace groups, particularly those from non-English-speaking countries. Ethnic concentration has a positive effect on immigrants’ location choice, and this is consistent across arrival cohorts. Furthermore, all immigrants are attracted to a particular location with high concentration of poor English-speaking immigrants or concentration of young individuals. However, immigrants are not attracted to a particular location with concentration of individuals who have not completed high school.     

The Impact of the Recent Economic Crisis on Unemployment Among Immigrants in Japan

This study explores how the contexts of immigrant reception were related to unemployment of immigrants in Japan during the global economic crisis in the 2000s. Little is known concerning what shaped unemployment of immigrants in institutional settings outside of North American and European countries during the financial crisis. This study focuses specifically on unskilled immigrants because this type of migrant worker has been highly vulnerable to economic cycles. We focused on Nikkeijin immigrants from Brazil and Peru and Asian immigrants from China, Indonesia, South Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam. We explored how immigrants’ unemployment in Japan was linked to immigration control policies, integration programs for refugees, labor market structures, and conditions of social capital. Empirical findings demonstrate that the trainee program strongly determined whether immigrants could remain in Japan during the unemployment period and that a significant difference in unemployment existed between Brazilian and Peruvian immigrants in Japan. Whereas ties with kin and co-ethnic friends did not help immigrants avoid unemployment, ties with Japanese spouses hindered unemployment among male immigrants, although this was not the case for female immigrants with Japanese spouses. Hence, immigrant unemployment depends considerably on how immigrants have been received in Japan. Conversely, we did not find any evidence of a positive role of the state government in mitigating immigrants’ unemployment in this study. Instead, the existing institutional context of immigrants’ reception in Japan has worsened the socioeconomic conditions of immigrants and strengthened their social marginalization, reflecting the lack of public debate regarding—and the lack of institutional support for—the integration of immigrants into the mainstream society.